Our View: A bad decision is back to haunt

Friday

Sep 14, 2018 at 9:10 AMSep 14, 2018 at 9:37 AM

It is, as Yogi Berra once put it when he described a baseball moment, "deja vu all over again." In this case, the deja vu, and the embarrassment that rightly goes with it, belongs to our North Carolina lawmakers. Several of the national media have looked at the potential damage Hurricane Florence is about to inflict and reminded us of that horrific moment in 2012 when the General Assembly voted to ban science from coastal development planning.

At the time, it made this state a national laughingstock, the butt of jokes on late-night television and a target for rightful skewering by op-ed columnists across the nation. Specifically, the lawmakers were reacting to a study by a panel of scientists working for the state Coastal Resources Commission. The researchers looked at projections for sea-level rise by the end of this century and chose one that reflected a middle-of-the-road estimate — one meter, or about 39 inches. The commission intended to use this as a guideline for planning coastal development and some critical infrastructure details, like the need to elevate roads and how to protect public utilities. Since then, regular measurements of sea-level rise have shown the estimate to be accurate, but likely conservative. The sea really is rising and it's already causing problems in coastal cities from Norfolk to Charleston to Miami. Parts of the North Carolina coast are especially vulnerable because not only is the ocean rising, but the land is also sinking.

The legislature passed a law that decreed, “No rule, policy, or planning guideline that defines a rate of sea-level change for regulatory purposes shall be adopted.” It was a gift to the state's deep-pocketed and politically powerful coastal development industry — just as it was a gift to comedians like Stephen Colbert, who congratulated the state and observed that, "By making this bold action on climate change today, you're insuring that when it actually comes, you'll have plenty of options, or at least two: Sink or swim."

Coastal residents are pursuing those very options today. It is, at least in part, a gift from those who chose lucrative inaction over protecting the safety and expensive investments of hundreds of thousands of coastal residents. According to the real estate website Zillow, nearly 900,000 homes worth nearly $170 billion are at risk from the tidal surge and other flooding likely to accompany Hurricane Florence this weekend. Many of those homes, of course, are long-standing structures, not part of recent developments, and planning decisions made in 2012 wouldn't have saved them. The problem is that we are continuing to develop our coastline as if sea levels aren't rising at all, and tropical storms aren't getting more intense. Public roads and utilities are accompanying that new development, as are other public facilities, like schools and police and fire departments, that serve them. They will be damaged in this storm and in subsequent ones as well, at enormous taxpayer cost.

That leads us to the public policy questions that our lawmakers have deliberately ducked as they act in thrall to the development and real estate industry: How do we protect the investments that the taxpayers are making in coastal structures and services? And even more fundamentally: When do we begin to use common sense in our decisions about coastal development? If the ocean is rising toward us, why aren't we backing up? How many times do we need to replace roads, bridges, wires and pipelines before we realize we're shoveling money into the tide?

As Florence's damage is assessed, our lawmakers need to pay attention and consider a more rational public policy, That would begin by accepting the objective measurements and projections of our scientists and using them in our planning. Legislators who can't do that deserve a quick ticket to retirement.

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